“I gave you no leave!” she said passionately, under her breath, as he let her go.

He met her flashing look with tender humbleness.

“Marcella!”

The word was just breathed into the air.  She wavered—­yet a chill had passed over her.  She could not recover the moment of magic.

“Not to-morrow,” she repeated steadily, though dreading lest she should burst into tears, “and not till I see clearly—­till I can—­” She caught her breath.  “Now I am going back to Lady Winterbourne.”

CHAPTER XIV.

For some hours after he reached his own room, Wharton sat in front of his open window, sunk in the swift rushing of thought, as a bramble sways in a river.  The July night first paled, then flushed into morning; the sun rose above the empty street and the light mists enwrapping the great city, before he threw himself on his bed, exhausted enough at last to fall into a restless sleep.

The speculation of those quick-pulsed hours was in the end about equally divided between Marcella and the phrases and turns of his interview with Mr. Pearson.  It was the sudden leap of troubled excitement stirred in him by that interview—­heightened by the sight of Raeburn—­that had driven him past recall by the most natural of transitions, into his declaration to Marcella.

But he had no sooner reached his room than, at first with iron will, he put the thought of Marcella, of the scene which had just passed, away from him.  His pulses were still quivering.  No matter!  It was the brain he had need of.  He set it coolly and keenly to work.

Mr. Pearson?  Well!—­Mr. Pearson had offered him a bribe; there could be no question as to that.  His clear sense never blinked the matter for an instant.  Nor had he any illusions as to his own behaviour.  Even now he had no further right to the sleep of the honest man.

Let him realise, however, what had happened.  He had gone to Lady Masterton’s party, in the temper of a man who knows that ruin is upon him, and determined, like the French criminal, to exact his cigar and eau de vie before the knife falls.  Never had things looked so desperate; never had all resource seemed to him so completely exhausted.  Bankruptcy must come in the course of a few weeks; his entailed property would pass into the hands of a receiver; and whatever recovery might be ultimately possible, by the end of August he would be, for the moment, socially and politically undone.

There could be no question of his proposing seriously to Marcella Boyce.  Nevertheless, he had gone to Lady Masterton’s on purpose to meet her; and his manner on seeing her had asserted precisely the same intimate claim upon her, which, during the past six weeks, had alternately attracted and repelled her.

Then Mr. Pearson had interrupted.

Wharton, shutting his eyes, could see the great man lean against the window-frame close to the spot where, a quarter of an hour later, Marcella had sat among the flowers—­the dapper figure, the long, fair moustaches, the hand playing with the eye-glass.